The first time that you pick this up and hold it in your hands, you will noticed that, "this feels good." The rubber grips on the back just makes a world of difference. The unit is stocky and feels solid and well built. For me, it has a certain ergo-nomical feeling that this unit is just right for my hands, hefty and chunky, but right. To a modern day gamer it would probably feel like you are holding a big fat brick. You will have your hands completely full! Not like these modern portables that you hold in your fingers. It is well balanced and not heavy, though it does have some weight to it, especially if you have the 6 AA batteries loaded up. One thing about it is, the AC adapter is huge compared to many systems, with the exception of the Turbo Express. The size of the system is a big contrast to the size of the game cards. And that is what you notice in a big way. The cards, or carts, are very thin and small in comparison. Atari even calls them cards right on the game box.
     In its "hey day" I purchased around four of these systems, at the time, from Atari. I still have three of them. I have the link cables and I remember having them hooked up with my family sitting around racing with Checked Flag. Good stuff, good memories.

     For the games that supported it, you could daisy chain up to 16 units! Which was rare, most only supported up to four. Some of my best games for the system are, KLAX, STUN Runner, Shanghai, Blue Lighting, Toki, Rygar, Ms. Pacman, Hydra, Raiden come to mind. The games that Epyx made for the system is probably the best games that were made for the hardware. This is only my opinion. Although the system was proclaimed to be 16 bit, a lot of the games have that 8 bit feel to them with that Lynx touch. It is said that over 100 games was released for the system with 50 games that was never released. How sad.
     You have to keep in mind that there was no other color handheld at the time in 1989, let alone any handheld that was backlit. There was no handheld that had a screen this size. (If you wanted another handheld, you would have to get the "Pea Green Screen" non-lit Gameboy.)
   The graphics are really nothing to write home about when you compare it to modern systems. It seems that they could have been better than the blocky pixilated look that dominates the games. Some games show a look that gives you the feel that they could have been better looking. But this does not distract from any of the games at all, unless you have been spoiled by any of the modern handheld systems. What really sets this system apart from the crowd is, this is the first video game system that had scaling and  scrolling built into the hardware! No home system had this until the SNES was released. One only has to play the game Blue Lighting to understand fully what this meant. (3D gameplay taking your jet toward the ground in a dive and watching the objects get bigger. It was and is a "go anywhere" experience.)

    The screen is a back lit LCD that is recessed real nice, good protection. The back lighting was great for the day. Comparing it to some of the modern day "back lit" screens it looks washed out and pail with that, "Have I got it at the right angle thought" running through your head. This may be due to it being LCD and your modern screens being TFT. But it does seem a little brighter than the old GB SP with the front lit screen. It suffers heavily if any sunlight is directly hitting the screen, you are not going to see a thing! There is a button that can turn the backlite off, during the time when you pause a game, to save on batteries. At the topside of the unit there is even a brightness control. The size is 82.55mm x 47.75mm (88.9mm/3.5" diagonal.) Screen resolution 160x102 with 16 on screen colors out of 4,096. (16 simultaneous per scan line.) For the day, this was super. (It was the only thing like it back then.) And it still looks good.